ALBION hope to get the diggers in on their £150 million New Monks Farm development within the next12 months after submitting a planning application.

Residents will get the chance to pore over the plans to finally bring IKEA to Sussex when they go live this week.

The club’s executive director Martin Perry said the scheme would bring huge economic benefits to the area adding to the “astonishing” contribution the club has made to the local economy.

And Mr Perry warned Adur would struggle to deliver the homes required of it by government if it turned down the 600 homes on offer - 30 per cent of which will be affordable.

The scheme includes a new 32,000 square metre IKEA store, to open in 2019, off the A27 in Lancing which will create 430 jobs.

It will also bring a 28 hectare country park, a traveller park, a site for a single form entry primary school with room to expand and two grass pitches for the club’s training ground.

To cope with the expected increase in traffic, £40 million of road improvements including the removal of the Sussex Pad lights and a new roundabout are proposed.

The club is predicting it will mean less traffic in the weekday morning peak and an increase of less than one per cent during the weekday evening peak.

It is estimated it will bring £11.5 million of economic benefits to the region with a £2.8 million boost to public coffers through council tax, business rates and new home bonus.

More than 5,000 people came to public exhibitions earlier this year with 1,000 completing feedback forms with flood risk and traffic highest on the list of concerns. Mr Perry said those concerns had been addressed in the planning application.

The club will form a maintenance management company and said the drainage system would be more than capable of coping with a “one in 100 year flood event” while reducing the flood risk for homes south of the railway.

Mr Perry said: “It’s everything we said it would be. It’s in line with the emerging Adur local plan which says a minimum 600 houses and minimum 10,000 square meters of employment space.

“In terms of housing, it’s the largest allocation Adur have in their local plan so if they were to lose this, their local plan would be seriously deficient, they would not be able to deliver on it.

“With more than 800 jobs, it brings the total Albion have created in the area to around 2,000 jobs on top of the projected economic activity of the football club in the Premier League. At Leicester that was measured to be £140 million so the economic benefit of the football club in this area is just astonishing.”